<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>The natural philosophy of magic by meteorMatador</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25273954">The natural philosophy of magic</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/meteorMatador/pseuds/meteorMatador'>meteorMatador</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2013-01-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2013-01-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 08:27:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>674</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25273954</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/meteorMatador/pseuds/meteorMatador</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A magical thought experiment</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The natural philosophy of magic</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You and your best friend are the world’s two greatest geniuses. You have just invented magic. As the world’s first witch and mage (she made herself a pointy hat) you set out to show off your unlimited power.</p><p>“We have a while till morning. Let’s brainstorm,” you say.</p><p>“Or we could just make the sun rise right now,” she says.</p><p>You nod. “The whole world’ll see that. Good idea. Give me a minute to figure out how much to speed up and slow down the planet’s rotation.”</p><p>“Wow, why bother? That’s so much extra work.” She points at the ground, below the horizon, and raises her finger towards the sky in an arc. The sun follows the path she traces, and seconds later the night sky is yielding to broad daylight.</p><p>Something is off about the simplicity of her spell. You start to admonish her for using an illusion instead of actually bending the planets to her will, and she looks at you like you are made of bats. On closer inspection, the sun has indeed changed position, but the earth beneath your feet has not. A chill runs down your spine. “Did you mess up the solar system so the sun goes around the earth?”</p><p>“Mess it up? That’s how it’s <em>supposed</em> to work. Why else would we say that the sun rises?” She plucks the moon from the sky with an audible <em>pop</em> and rolls it around in the palm of her hand.</p><p>You feel like you could explode. Your best friend, a world-class genius, has a geocentric understanding of astronomy. The merest suspicion never entered your mind, for which you kick yourself. Memories of strange comments from the past few years, things you’d dismissed as playful nonsense, finally make sense in light of this development.</p><p>The worst part, though, is that she seems to be right. The manipulations she performed so effortlessly just now are logical extrapolations of the system of magic you built together, if and only if the universe is a compact geocentric arrangement. Could everything you know about the world be horribly wrong?</p><p>As a scientist you have no choice but to test that hypothesis. You cast your own spell, raising a hand towards Jupiter, feeling the vast weight of it all the way up your arm. Yep, it’s definitely Jupiter. Changing its orbit without destroying it would take all week, but something much smaller can be moved around freely in a few minutes. You weave an invisible thread across the vast distance and sit in the lotus position to concentrate.</p><p>The world moves for you. The light of the sun shifts, then blinks out behind you as you briefly outrun it. Planet Earth obediently follows the path you prescribed and settles into its new orbit among the moons of Jupiter. The view is nothing less than spectacular.</p><p>It’s the witch’s turn to be flabbergasted. Once she picks her jaw up off the floor, she complains of how shrinking the sun has muted its warmth and sets about repairing some of your damage, drawing Ptolemaic diagrams in the sand to keep track of her work. Then while you patiently relate the story of Copernicus and Galileo, she proceeds to rearrange all the stars in the sky into one giant constellation, a realistic image of a human butt.</p><p>“STOP <em>DOING</em> THAT,” you howl.</p><p>You bicker for hours. She <em>knows</em> the world is geocentric and can prove it. You know it is not and can prove it is not. Neither of you is able to grasp why the universe follows such different rules for the other’s magic. The cosmos is in total disarray from your demonstrations. Your tempers erupt and you exchange stinging insults. Your friendship disintegrates.</p><p>“We’ll just have to agree to disagree, I guess.” She pokes the tattered ashes of her pointy hat (which you set on fire) with a stick. “You can do your thing and I’ll do mine, until we come up with an answer.”</p><p>Thus the two of you part ways, never to speak again.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>